The Vikings are often portrayed as illiterate, uncultured barbarians who evinced more interest in plunder than in poetry. In fact, the Vikings left behind a great number of documents in stone, wood ...

Runes are the characters of the alphabet used by the Vikings and other Germanic peoples from about the second to the 15th centuries A.D. Some runes vaguely resemble letters in our own alphabet; others ...

Archeologists in Norway have discovered the world’s oldest dated runestone, featuring runic inscriptions from up to 2,000 years ago. Researchers at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History ...

Two rare artifacts inscribed with ancient letters, or runes, could be the key to a mysterious era of Viking history when they suddenly abandoned their old alphabet and transitioned to a new one.

Melissa D'costa finds out more about the stones, which have been carved with an ancient and sacred Germanic alphabet, for divination Melissa D'costa finds out more about the stones, which have been ...

Both the Celtic Ogham and the Germanic Futhark have unique sequences for which no interpretation has yet been found. The composition of the Ogham and the Futhark is mostly explained by complicated ...

Like many important discoveries, it happened by accident. Alena Slamova, a Czech graduate student in archaeology, was routinely washing some animal bones that had been recovered from a dig in an early ...

The people most commonly associated with runes are the Norsemen, and, within that, Vikings. Countless artefacts, from gravestones to vases, have been found with rune carvings on them. People used ...